The Lovecraft Tarot is a standard seventy-eight card deck produced by Lo Scarabeo and distributed by Llewellyn Worldwide. It's borderless with no gilded edges, and made of high-quality playing card stock. The dimensions are also standard to usual tarot decks; strong and flexible but lightweight and easy to work with.
The cards are rendered in sepia and muted tones, which gives them an ethereal, otherworldly quality. Because of this, these cards are an excellent tool for shadow and dream work. It can help with working through past issues, especially those involving grief and anxiety. If you want to dream walk with these cards, place a notebook and the cards on the nightstand. If you are good at lucid dreaming, waking up and asking the deck clarifying questions and journaling with them could bring surprising results.
The booklet matches the standard format for a Lo Scarabeo Tarot deck. It is small, multilingual, and brief. The interpretations follow the WRS deck, but are slightly different and more intense. The Eight of Swords, for example, depicts a blindfolded woman standing on a beach surrounded by swords. In the Lovecraft tarot, the woman is held captive in a jar by a three-eyed ogre. The ogre isn’t looking at her, but at the reader, as if to say, “So, what are you going to do about it?”
Unlike the Devil, which suggests voluntary submission to one’s lusts, the Eight of Swords shows us how whatever is imprisoning us may look big and frightening, but the jar is made of glass, and it can break under the right circumstances.
It’s really a beautiful deck and perfect for spooky season. Despite all the eldritch horrors, the deck is quite friendly, and even a bit playful. I hope, that at some point, Lo Scarabeo will produce a better guidebook for this deck.
~review by Patricia Snodgrass
Creators: Michele Penco and Valentina Camerini
Llewellyn Worldwide (Lo Scarabeo), 2026
p.126, 78 cards, $28.95
